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This was my first time at Photoshop World, and my first time staying in Vegas. Captivated by the blown glass showcase in the newly renovated US boarding lounge, I left Edmonton International Airport with anxious anticipation. One stop in Denver and another short flight to McCarren,Las Vegas and I walked out into what felt like a blast furnace. 9pm at night and it was still 37°C/100°F!

The next morning I took the time to explore. First off I found the Convention Center. Then I went on to explore the rest of the hotel. Lots of good restaurants, a huge gaming floor, my point of interest though was the pool. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the Mandalay Bay has one of the biggest and best swimming pools in North America, (Well actually its several pools) complete with sandy beach for use by hotel guests.

Time to venture outside. Now although I’ve lived in Canada almost all my adult life, I was brought up in England and in true British style my first instinct is always to “get a bit of fresh air” and walk. From my bedroom window I could see the Luxor, Excalibur, New York,New York, Monte Carlo, Cosmopolitan and many more. So covered in SPF50, with my Camera and lenses in my backpack, and my Galaxy Nexus in hand I set off. By the time I got to the Luxor I was pleasantly hot, by Excalibur I was baked. It was at this point that I discovered that not only is there a free tram between the three hotels but a covered walkway.

I had been looking forward to the first time attendees orientation session, so by 3pm I made my way back to the Convention Center. Larry Becker imparted words of wisdom to those of us embarking on our first conference.The most important of which (and of course, this is only my personal opinion) was leave your Photoshop World Conference Workbook in your room and take notes on paper.(The book weighing in on my home scales at 2lbs 6ozs/1.8kgs.)

The other excellent piece of advise…bring snacks!

I was like a kid in a candy store. Which session do I go to?

Please bear with me as I use such superlative adjectives as:

awesome

amazing

enlightening

entertaining

and just plain fun!

The next three days were packed with too much to do and see, and as the time went on the sessions just seemed to get better and better. Just a few of the sessions I attended were:

How Do I Use These Brushes – (Pete Collins) FUN!!! – Erodible tips, drag me from the computer.

Sharing Socially Bringing People Back To Your Website – (RC Concepcion) Awesome and Entertaining – This was a last minute change of plan, I’d originally intended to go to another session but I enjoyed RC’s teaching style, loved his anecdotes, marveled at his Star Wars Images, (My family are all Geeks) and will no longer be ignoring Flickr.

Live Food Photography Shoot – (Joe Glyda) Amazing I went to this session because by chance I came in midway on his Design Session on the Expo floor, which reminded me of all those things that you learn, way back when but that overtime you forget. One of the best tips from the whole conference,(and I’m paraphrasing here) “Walk around back, you’ll find things that others miss.”

Getting Started with Premiere® Pro

– (Rich Harrington) Best in Show – Amazing! – Another one of those lucky accidents. I was walking around the expo floor and was in the book store, (To anyone who knows me this is not a surprise) and there was a session just about to start so I sat down.

Now I was taught when adjusting your photo’s you use levels, then play around with curves until you have a sort of “s” shape that looks good, then sharpen your image. I think my jaw literally dropped open as I saw the proper use of curves. This was an instructor worth following. What else was he teaching? Premiere® Pro? I’ve used the video in Photoshop and Camtasia Studio for the odd project.A lot of my clients love my slides on Animoto. When I came to the conference I had no intention of even looking at Premiere® Pro but I bit the bullet and now I can’t wait to get started.

Yes, I am on information overload. Every session had something in it. If you want a glimpse into just some of what went on you can go to the Photoshop World official site and You Tube.

I will be touching back on some of the things that I learned, in blogs to come. In the meantime I can say with no reservation whatsoever, that if you are interested in improving your images, meeting friendly, helpful and inspiring photographers, Photoshop and other Adobe product users, and are dying to see and learn about the latest and greatest plan to attend Photoshop World.
To see a few more of my Las Vegas images please visit my Safe 2 Pin “Las Vegas” Board on Pinterest.

Color is a whole science unto itself. Most people are aware of the color wheel, hue (adding black to a color) and tint (adding white) but what is color space?

Color Space

In its simplest terms a color space is:

An ordered list of numbers that represents specific colors.

That’s why you have numbers when you use a color picker/tool. Anyone familiar with HTML may have used the standard HTML (Hexadecimal) Color Space part of which is pictured below.

Color Management.

Why do we worry about color space? Color space is really all about color management. In most cases I want the colors I see on my screen to be as near as possible to the color of the that images I print.
There are lots of color spaces but the most well known are RGB and CMYK.

RGB and CMYK

RGB stands for Red, Green, and Blue and CMYK for Cyan, Magenta,Yellow and Black. RGB and CMYK are the two color spaces that most people are aware of but they are many color spaces, in fact you can even make your own.

RGB

When you view an image on screen you’re viewing RGB color. Three color guns project Red, Green and Blue onto the screen.

A few years ago if you were designing your images for use on the web you were advised to use the 256 web safe colors. That was because most computers could only accurately reproduce those 256 colors. Nowadays most computers and devices can see in millions of colors.

Note:

256 Colors is also known as 8 bit color. Each pixel is made up of one 8 bit, byte. (A byte being made up of the amount of information it takes to store 1 character on a computer.) A 16 bit system gives thousands of colors, and 24 bit system renders millions of colors.

RGB also has sub groups or think of them as different flavors of RGB color.

For example:

sRGB is a color space that came about in 1996 when Microsoft and Hewlett Packard got together to decide on a standard for their monitors, and printers.

Adobe RGB was created by Adobe in 1998 to coincide with the release of Photoshop 5.0.

CMYK

CMYK is used in printing. The four inks are applied in the order Cyan, Magenta, Yellow then Black. I always thought that they decided to take the last letter of black, because the B for blue was already taken but the K actually stands for Key. The four printing blocks were originally “keyed” in alignment with each other the key plate on the bottom being black.

Other Color Spaces.
Greyscale
Greyscale is exactly what it says
If you are a Photoshop user and you look under the Image Menu – Mode You will see a list including Lab (Pronounced L-ab and not lab) This is a quite interesting color space based on the human ability to see differences in colors opposite to each other on the color wheel.

This has barely touched the surface of color so for those of you who have a need to satisfy your inner Geek further reading can be found at: